Joseph Ellis has once again proven his friendship and his longtime habit of civilized discourse. Given enough time to slowly work our way through a case of good brandy together, we believe our differences on religion might be greatly narrowed, and we could see without misunderstanding where each of us stood. It is actually very hard, in life, to achieve real disagreement. Mutual misunderstanding is far more frequent.

Professor Ellis takes a creative step forward when he highlights the “core” of our disagreement, how to define religion. Our attempt to advance a corresponding step would be to note two ways in which Biblical religion (Judaism and Christianity) differs from earlier pagan religions, from Islam, and from 18th century deism.

First of all, Biblical religion holds that the Creator is intimately concerned with the inner conscience of human beings (the principle Jefferson draws on in his Statute for Religious Freedom); and also that in reply to our prayers (“ask and you shall receive”), the God of the Bible “interposes” his divine action into the affairs of men, the rise and fall of nations, and even the inner thoughts and inspirations of human individuals.

Secondly, the Biblical God “who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time” (Jefferson). He invited us into friendship with Him–the friendship of free women and men, not slaves. As William Penn put it, if friendship, then freedom. From this insight flowed the Liberty Bell of Philadelphia. Thus, biblical religion conceived of history as a long-term effort to bring human freedom into fruition across this planet (“Go teach all nations”). As the historian Lord Acton wrote, the history of liberty is coincident with the history of Judaism/Christianity.

In other words, the Biblical God is “the god of liberty.” It was for liberty that the Creator made the world. It is by giving humans liberty that He made them “in His image.” Unlike the Greek Fates, the Biblical God is sovereign and free; unlike the Muslim Allah who is pure will (over-ruling reason and law), the Biblical God is the light that suffuses the intelligibility of all natural and human law, and all individuals and events. The Biblical God lives liberty through, not license, but self-government under law: “Confirm thy soul in self-control/ Thy liberty in law.”

In our book, Washington’s God, we list three full pages of the names of God (about 100 of them) used by Washington at numerous times and in many contexts. Many of these can only be understood in the light of the Biblical God, and the rest are at least consistent with earlier Christian traditions for speaking of God (often language adapted from the classical philosophy of Athens and Rome, such as some of the names by which Aquinas called the God reached by philosophy “The First Cause,” “Final Cause,” and “Pure Act,” “Great Governor,” “Disposer of All Events,” and the like).

Herewith 19 of the 102 names used by Washington, as we listed them in an appendix to Washington’s God: “Creator,” “Divine Author of our blessed Religion,” “God,” “Allwise disposer of events,” “All Wise, and all Powerfull [sic] Director of Human Events,” “Author of the Universe,” “That Being who sees, foresees, and directs all things,” “Benign Parent of the Human Race,” “God of Armies,” “Great Author of every public and private good,” “Great Creator,” “Great Disposer of Human Events,” “Great Searcher of human hearts,” “Jehovah,” “Jesus Christ” [found only once], “Overruling Providence,” “Supreme Arbiter of Human Events,” “Wise disposer of all Events,” and “Wonder-working Deity.” To use both philosophical and biblical names for God stands in a long tradition, indeed.

We have both cherished Ellis’s Founding Brothers as one of the two most satisfying and illuminating books on the founding period we have ever discovered. So we are timid in wondering whether Professor Ellis does full justice to Washington’s ways of speaking of God. Having been present as a number of Christians dear to us have died–with Stoic virtue, and sometimes without the presence of any priest or clergyman–we fail to see the conflict that Professor Ellis hypothesizes between being Stoic and being Christian. For many centuries, this combination of Stoic and Christian has been at the heart of Christian humanism. One encounters it everywhere in the early Roman church.

Furthermore, Ellis explains that he regards Washington as a “pantheist” because Washington held that “other-worldly forces,” of which he became aware, “had earthly presences.” But this is true of orthodox Christian notions of Providence across many, many centuries: “General Providence” works through all created things by quite natural (secondary) causes, and also through unique and contingent events which form so much of the texture of human life. The workings of “The Great Governor” of all events appear even in natural courses of action, not at all marked by “miracles.” The yellow fog that for six extended hours protected Washington’s “providential” escape from Long Island in August 1776 need not have been “miraculous”–fogs around Long Island are all too ordinary. But the timing of this particular fog certainly was a blessing. It meant the safe escape of the Army of Liberty, to fight another day. It meant a very narrow escape from instant failure in the War for Independence.

Professor Ellis repeats in his second blog four bits of evidence he addressed in his first: After Franklin’s appeal for prayers to Providence, Hamilton quipped that he didn’t think “foreign aid is necessary.” The first time, Professor Ellis suggests that this quip may be “apocryphal.” We have not yet been able to locate that text, and it has the ring of the 20th century, rather than the 18th. If Hamilton said it, it is significant. We would welcome being able to verify it.

Diderot’s hideous boast of “strangling the last king with the entrails of the last priest” has always struck us as a signal of the bloodthirstiness of the French Enlightenment (in 1789), as compared with the calm appreciation for religion characteristic of the British Enlightenment. No Anglicans would have spoken so about strangling their king, the head of their church. Following Gertrude Himmelfarb, we systematically differentiate the Anglo-American Enlightenment from the German and, especially, the French.

Again, since we are Roman Catholics, disputes among Protestants as to which Christian tradition most affected the founding generation do not arouse our passion. We would be happy enough to discover whatever truth emerges from conflicting claims. Indeed, since most European Catholics regard the American founding as materialistic, Masonic, anti-social, and laic (as secular as French democracy), we have been surprised and pleased to learn that that charge is false. Secondly, and most significant of all, as Catholics, we are well aware that evangelical Christians, much as we admire them, would properly resist accepting us as spokespersons. Some have doubted the validity of our Catholic faith altogether!

Professor Ellis finds that the relative cultural power of “secular progressives”–those historians, philosophers, sociologists, engineers, humanities professors, and scientists whose raised eyebrows dominate the nation’s symbolic institutions (the universities, newspapers, magazines, book publishers, television, movies, the law schools, the judiciary)–is less than the cultural power of evangelical Christians.

Our experience is a little different. It seems to us that evangelicals are humiliated almost daily in the national media, mocked, and joked about even in polite circles, as targets of the “last acceptable bigotry.” Evangelical Christians are the last group standing that can be made fun of without being attacked in return.

Yet still, our concern is not to take the side of evangelicals–but, more simply, to study the actual words and letters of the Founders in order to understand our founding period. That period is a treasure trove of lessons to be learned by us today–to ignore the role of religion at that time is like asking an eagle to fly with just one wing.

It was the relatively few Baptists of southern Virginia to whom we most owe the First Amendment. They insisted, by threatening to withhold the substantial vote they cast within his new district, that Madison go back to Congress and get the Right to Religious Liberty into the Constitution, by amendment, even though his own preference was not to do so. He got the point, and he did so.

That is why it is no surprise that Jefferson chose for the audience of his letter on “the wall of separation between church and state” a Baptist convocation. He knew whence came the social strength for religious liberty.